Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free SpiritsNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Human beings
=Survival of Religious Training in the Disposition.=--The Catholic
Church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain
of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and
withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm,
rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy,
regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who
involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and
lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in
course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the
house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its
shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power--who would care
to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they
rest became extinct? But the results of all these things are
nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional,
prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in
man largely through cultivation. What still exists in his soul was
formerly, as he germinated, grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.
131
=Religious After-Pains.=--Though one believe oneself absolutely weaned
away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make
impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and
dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music;
and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes,
through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the
whole true gospel in the look of Raphael's Madonna," we greet such
declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has
here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with that which he is
glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. Hence it is
observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas
but yield readily to the magic of religious feelings; it is a source of
pain to them to let the latter go simply on account of the
former.--Scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest on
account of this necessity--an evolved and hence, also, a transitory
necessity--delusions are smuggled in. Even logicians speak of
"presentiments" of truth in ethics and in art (for example of the
presentiment that the essence of things is unity) a thing which,
nevertheless, ought to be prohibited. Between carefully deduced truths
and such "foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that the
former are products of the intellect and the latter of the necessity.
Hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand to appease it. Hunger
merely craves food. "Presentiment" does not denote that the existence of
a thing is known in any way whatever. It denotes merely that it is
deemed possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. The
"presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of certainty.--It
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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